"Old News"? "Rehashed for Over a Decade"?
In Ron Paul's
statement responding to The New
Republic's story about his old newsletters, he said the
following:
Has Paul really disassociated himself from, and "taken moral responsibility" for, these "Ron Paul" newsletters "for over a decade"? If he has, that history has not been recorded by the Nexis database, as best as I can reckon.
The first indication I could find of Paul either expressing remorse about the statements or claiming that he did not author them came in an October 2001 Texas Monthly article -- less than eight years ago. Here is the relevant excerpt, which references a Ron Paul newsletter that referred to then-Rep. Barbara Jordan as "Barbara Morondon," and called her the "archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism":
The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts. [...]
This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. [...]
When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.
Has Paul really disassociated himself from, and "taken moral responsibility" for, these "Ron Paul" newsletters "for over a decade"? If he has, that history has not been recorded by the Nexis database, as best as I can reckon.
The first indication I could find of Paul either expressing remorse about the statements or claiming that he did not author them came in an October 2001 Texas Monthly article -- less than eight years ago. Here is the relevant excerpt, which references a Ron Paul newsletter that referred to then-Rep. Barbara Jordan as "Barbara Morondon," and called her the "archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism":
What made the statements in the publication even more puzzling was that, in four terms as a U.S. congressman and one presidential race, Paul had never uttered anything remotely like this.
When I ask him why, he pauses for a moment, then says, "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a delightful lady." Paul says that item ended up there because "we wanted to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter and became personalized. I never personalize anything."
His reasons for keeping this a secret are harder to understand: "They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them ... I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn't come from me directly, but they [campaign aides] said that's too confusing. 'It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.'" It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time.
So what exactly did Paul and his campaign say about these and more egregious statements during his contentious 1996 campaign for Congress, when Democrat Lefty Morris made the newsletters a constant issue? Besides complaining that the quotes were taken "out of context" and proof of his opponent's "race-baiting," Paul and his campaign defended and took full ownership of the comments. For a chronological Nexis tour of Paul's 1996 responses, please read on.
The first time I can find reporting on the controversy is in the
22 May 1996 Dallas Morning News:
Dr. Ron Paul, a Republican congressional candidate from Texas, wrote in his political newsletter in 1992 that 95 percent of the black men in Washington, D.C., are "semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
He also wrote that black teenagers can be "unbelievably fleet of foot." [...]
Dr. Paul, who is running in Texas' 14th Congressional District, defended his writings in an interview Tuesday. He said they were being taken out of context.
"It's typical political demagoguery," he said. "If people are interested in my character ... come and talk to my neighbors." [...]
According to a Dallas Morning News review of documents circulating among Texas Democrats, Dr. Paul wrote in a 1992 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report: "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be."
Dr. Paul, who served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said Tuesday that he has produced the newsletter since 1985 and distributes it to an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 subscribers. A phone call to the newsletter's toll-free number was answered by his campaign staff. [...]
Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation. [...]
"If someone challenges your character and takes the interpretation of the NAACP as proof of a man's character, what kind of a world do you live in?" Dr. Paul asked.
In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.
"If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them," Dr. Paul said.
He also said the comment about black men in the nation's capital was made while writing about a 1992 study produced by the National Center on Incarceration and Alternatives, a criminal justice think tank based in Virginia.
Citing statistics from the study, Dr. Paul then concluded in his column: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
"These aren't my figures," Dr. Paul said Tuesday. "That is the assumption you can gather from" the report.
Is the cult of Ron Paul telling you everything?
23 May 1996, Houston Chronicle:
Paul, a Republican obstetrician from Surfside, said Wednesday he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." [...]
Paul also wrote that although "we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational.
Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers."
A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.
Paul continues to write the newsletter for an undisclosed number of subscribers, the spokesman said.
Writing in the same 1992 edition, Paul expressed the popular idea that government should lower the age at which accused juvenile criminals can be prosecuted as adults.
He added, "We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23.
That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
Paul also asserted that "complex embezzling" is conducted exclusively by non-blacks.
"What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn't that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?" he wrote.
23 May 1996, Austin American-Statesman:
"Dr. Paul is being quoted out of context," [Paul spokesman Michael] Sullivan said. "It's like picking up War and Peace and reading the fourth paragraph on Page 481 and thinking you can understand what's going on." [...]
Also in 1992, Paul wrote, "Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions."
Sullivan said Paul does not consider people who disagree with him to be sensible. And most blacks, Sullivan said, do not share Paul's views. The issue is political philosophy, not race, Sullivan said.
"Polls show that only about 5 percent of people with dark-colored skin support the free market, a laissez faire economy, an end to welfare and to affirmative action," Sullivan said. [...]
"You have to understand what he is writing. Democrats in Texas are trying to stir things up by using half-quotes to impugn his character," Sullivan said. "His writings are intellectual. He assumes people will do their own research, get their own statistics, think for themselves and make informed judgments."
26 May 1996 Washington Post:
Paul, an obstetrician from Surfside, Tex., denied he is a racist and charged Austin lawyer Charles "Lefty" Morris, his Democratic opponent, with taking his 1992 writings out of context.
"Instead of talking about the issues, our opponent has chosen to lie and try to deceive the people of the 14th District," said Paul spokesman Michael Sullivan, who added that the excerpts were written during the Los Angeles riots when "Jesse Jackson was making the same comments."
"Ron knows our society and our nation has done some horrible things to the black community, which has pushed a majority of young black men in some areas, in Washington, D.C., for example, into criminal activities," Sullivan said.
25 July 1996, Houston Chronicle:
Democratic congressional candidate Lefty Morris on Wednesday produced a newsletter in which his Republican opponent, Ron Paul, called the late Barbara Jordan a "fraud" and an "empress without clothes." [...]
Paul said he was expressing his "clear philosophical difference" with Jordan. [...]
Paul, a Surfside physician and former congressman, said he was contrasting Jordan's political views with his own.
"The causes she so strongly advocated were for more and more government, more and more regulations and more and more taxes," Paul said.
"My cause has been almost exactly the opposite, and I believe her positions to have been fundamentally wrong," the Republican said. ""I've fought for less and less intrusive government, fewer regulations and lower taxes."
Paul said Morris was trying to "reduce the campaign to name-calling and race-baiting" so as to avoid more relevant issues, such as economic growth, taxes and spending, crime and welfare reform.
25 July 1996, Dallas Morning News:
Dr. Paul, who faces Mr. Morris in the 14th District race for the U.S. House, dismissed the criticism as "name-calling and race-baiting." [...]
In a written statement, Dr. Paul said, "Repeated attempts by my liberal opponent to reduce the campaign to name-calling and race-baiting is just more of the same old garbage we expect from his camp and will not deter me from continuing to address the real issues."
Dr. Paul said his opinions about Ms. Jordan, who died earlier this year, "represented our clear philosophical difference."
29 July 1996, Roll Call:
In a statement, Paul said he had "labored to conduct a campaign based upon the issues that are vital to our nation" and charged Morris with "repeated attempts...to reduce the campaign to name calling and race-baiting."
He called Morris's request that he release all back issues of the newsletter "not only impractical, but...equivalent to asking him to provide documents for every lawsuit he has been involved in during his lengthy legal career."
Of his statements about Jordan, Paul said that "such opinions represented our clear philosophical difference. The causes she so strongly advocated were for more government, more and more regulations, and more and more taxes. My cause has been almost exactly the opposite, and I believe her positions to have been fundamentally wrong: I've fought for less and less intrusive government, fewer regulations, and lower taxes."
13 August 1996, Houston Chronicle:
He once called former President Bush a bum and he's taken aim at Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, California Gov. Pete Wilson, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, and, yes, GOP vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp.
Over the course of 1992 and 1993, the GOP nominee in the 14th Congressional District has called Kemp a "malicious jerk," and a "welfare statist" who had secretly increased the nation's public housing budget while serving as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He also charged in one newsletter that Kemp had "made a pass at a female reporter young enough to be his daughter."
26 September 1996, Austin American-Statesman:
"Fortunately, several types of accounts are tough for the IRS to investigate," Paul wrote. "For instance, it's still legal to open a bank account without revealing your Social Security number."
He also offered to help readers get a foreign passport.
"Peru recently announced that it will sell its citizenship to foreigners for $25,000," Paul wrote. "... People concerned about survival are naturally interested in a second citizenship and passport. If you're interested, drop me a note and include your telephone number, and I'll get you some interesting information." [...]
Paul, a Surfside obstetrician, former member of Congress and 1988 Libertarian Party nominee for president, said Morris quotes material out of context. Paul also said his advice was appropriate at the time it was published.
30 September 1996, San Antonio Express-News:
Paul, a Surfside obstetrician, former congressman and the 1988 Libertarian presidential candidate, counterclaimed that Morris is name-calling to avoid discussing the issues like taxes and abortion.
Repeated requests by telephone and by fax to interview Paul for this article were denied.
Paul's spokesman Michael Quinn Sullivan said the candidate does not want to "rehash" old issues. [...]
Paul has said he opposes racism and accused Morris of reducing the campaign to "name-calling and race-baiting."
11 October 1996, Houston Chronicle:
Paul, who earlier this week said he still wrote the newsletter for subscribers, was unavailable for comment Thursday. But his spokesman, Michael Quinn Sullivan, accused Morris of "gutter-level politics."
Sullivan said it was "silly" to try to make a political issue of something written in an "abstract" sense. [...]
In his April 15, 1992, newsletter, Paul wrote about a person who had a beef with the IRS and "fired bombs through mortars" one night at an IRS building in California. Some federal property was damaged, but no one was injured, and the defendant was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
"Unfortunately (the defendant's) war against the IRS was not nearly as successful as Harry's War," wrote Paul, who wants to abolish the federal tax-collection agency. "Harry's War" was a movie about a fictional individual's battle against the IRS.
Sullivan said Morris "would rather sling mud at Ron Paul than talk about the issues or discuss how his own campaign is being almost completely financed by two liberal special interest groups: the trial lawyers and big labor."
11 October 1996, Austin American-Statesman:
Paul's aide, Eric Rittberg, said -- as a Jew -- he was "outraged and insulted by the senseless, anti-Semitic statements Mr. Morris is making."
"Lefty is taking statements out of context," Sullivan said. "When you are not looking at things in context, you can make anyone look horrible."
Ron Paul doesn't seem to know much about his own newsletters.
The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware,
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about
African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He
told CNN last
week that he still has "no idea" who might have written
inflammatory comments such as "Order was only restored in L.A. when
it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare
checks"—statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with
reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian
activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man
as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder
Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's
congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice
president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that
published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron
Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in
2001. During the period when the most incendiary
items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent
libertarian theorist M.N. Rothbard championed an open strategy of
exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with
populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and
manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary
mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by
The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend
and advisor to Paul—accompanying
him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the
LewRockwell.com
blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the
avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio
recordings.
Rockwell has
denied responsibility for the newsletters' contents to The
New Republic's Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to
discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this
week that he had "nothing to say." He has characterized
discussion of the newsletters as "hysterical smears aimed at
political enemies" of The New Republic. Paul himself
called the
controversy "old news" and "ancient history" when we reached
him last week, and he has not responded to further request for
comment.
But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told
reason that Rockwell authored much of the content
of the Political Report and Survival Report. "If
Rockwell had any honor he'd come out and I say, ‘I wrote this
stuff,'" said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul
remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign
responsibility for the letters. "He should have done it 10 years
ago."
Rockwell was publicly named as Paul's ghostwriter as far back as
a 1988 issue of the now-defunct movement monthly American
Libertarian. "This was based on my understanding at the time
that Lew would write things that appeared in Ron's various
newsletters," former AL editor Mike Holmes told
reason. "Neither Ron nor Lew ever told me that,
but other people close to them such as M.N. suggested
that Lew was involved, and it was a common belief in libertarian
circles."
Individualist-feminist Wendy McElroy, who on her blog
characterized the author as an associate of hers for many years,
called the
ghostwriter's identity "an open secret within the circles in which
I run." Though she declined to name names either on her blog or
when contacted by reason, she later approvingly
cited a post naming Rockwell at the anonymous blog
RightWatch.
Timothy Wirkman Virkkala, formerly the managing editor of the
libertarian magazine Liberty, told reason
that the names behind the Political Report were widely
known in his magazine's offices as well, because Liberty's
late editor-in-chief, Bill Bradford, had discussed the newsletters
with the principals, and then with his staff. "I understood that
Burton S. Blumert was the moneybags that got all this started, that
he was the publisher," Virkkala said. "Lew Rockwell, editor and
chief writer; Jeff Tucker, assistant, probably a writer; Rothbard, cheering from the sidelines, probably ghosting now and
then." (Virkkala has offered his own reaction to the controversy
at his Web site.)
Blumert, Paul's 1988 campaign chairman and a
private supporter
this year, did not respond to a request for an interview; Rothbard
died in 1995. We reached Tucker, now editorial vice president of
Rockwell's Mises.org, at his office, and were told: "I just really
am not going to make a statement, I'm sorry. I'll take all
responsibility for being the editor of Mises.org, OK?"
Besides Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell, the officers of Ron Paul
& Associates included Paul's wife Carol, Paul's daughter Lori
Pyeatt, Paul staffer Penny Langford-Freeman, and longtime campaign
manager Mark Elam (who has managed every Paul congressional
campaign since 1996 and is currently the Texas coordinator for the
presidential run), according to tax records from 1993 and 2001.
Langford-Freeman did not respond to interview requests as of press
time. Elam, president of M&M Graphics and Advertising,
confirmed to reason that his company printed the
newsletters, but said that the texts reached him as finished
products.
The publishing operation was lucrative. A tax document from June
1993—wrapping up the year in which the Political Report
had published the "welfare checks" comment on the L.A.
riots—reported an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul &
Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul's family and
Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country. If Paul
didn't know who was writing his newsletters, he knew they were a
crucial source of income and a successful tool for building his
fundraising base for a political comeback.
The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones
published between Paul's return to private life after three full
terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid
(1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The
letters published between Paul's first run for president and his
return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims
that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that
black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack
house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers
"enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
Eric Dondero, Paul's estranged former volunteer and personal
aide, worked for Paul on and off between 1987 and 2004 (back when
he was named "Eric Rittberg"), and since the Iraq war has become
one of the congressman's most vociferous and notorious critics. By
Dondero's account, Paul's inner circle learned between his
congressional stints that "the wilder they got, the more bombastic
they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the
newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from
that period." Cato Institute President Ed Crane told
reason he recalls a conversation from some time in
the late 1980s in which Paul claimed that his best source of
congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for
The Spotlight,
the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust
denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001.
The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece
with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by
Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the
Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election,
Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian"
movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism
and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they
launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted
a plan they
hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.
Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990
Liberty essay entitled "The Case for
Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the
stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused."
To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values.
"State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is
State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not
wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate
with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex,
or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."
The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay
Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell
Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo
Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion
leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to
a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph
McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would
fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by
targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a
former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a
1990
Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be
mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by
exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business
and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and
caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are
looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes
in America."
Anyone with doubts about the composition of the "parasitic
Underclass" could look to the regular "PC Watch" feature of the
Report, in which Rockwell compiled tale after tale of
thuggish black men terrifying petite white and Asian women. (Think
Birth of a Nation crossed with News of the
Weird.) The list of PC outrages in the February 1993 issue,
for example, cited a Washington Post column on films that
feature "plenty of interracial sex, and nobody noticing," a news
article about black members of the Southern Methodist University
marching band "engaged in mass shoplifting while in Japan," and a
sob story about a Korean shop-owner who shot a black shoplifter and
assailant in the head: The travesty is that Mrs. Du got five years
probation, and must cancel a trip to Korea.
The populist outreach program centered on tax reduction,
abolition of welfare, elimination of "the entire 'civil rights'
structure, which tramples on the property rights of every
American," and a police crackdown on "street criminals." "Cops must
be unleashed," Rothbard wrote, "and allowed to administer instant
punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error."
While they're at it, they should "clear the streets of bums and
vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?" To seal the deal with
social conservatives, Rothbard urged a federalist compromise in
their direction on "pornography, prostitution, or abortion." And
because grassroots organizing is "plodding and boring," this new
paleo coalition would need to be kick-started by "high-level,
preferably presidential, political campaigns."
The presidential campaign Rothbard and Rockwell supported in
1988 was Ron Paul's run on the Libertarian Party ticket. In 1992,
they were again ready to back Paul, until Pat Buchanan convinced
the obstetrician to withdraw and back his conservative challenge to
then-president Bush. "We have a dream," Rockwell wrote in that same
January 1992 edition of RRR, "and perhaps someday it will
come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream, why can't we?)
Our dream is that, one day, we Buchananites can present Mr. and
Mrs. America, and all the liberal and conservative and centrist
elites, with a dramatic choice....We can say: 'Look, gang: you have
a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke.'"
Carol Moore, a left-libertarian activist who opposed Rothbard,
Rockwell, and Paul at the late 1980s Libertarian conventions that
led to the paleo split, theorizes that the defeat made them bitter.
"They had a tendency to be anti-PC," Moore told
reason, "and it was really stepped up after they
lost. They were really angry and not that funny."
They are less angry these days. Visitors to LewRockwell.com or
Mises.org since 2001 are less likely to feel the need for a shower.
One can almost detect what sounds like mellowing in Rockwell's
reflections on the high and heady paleo days, unburdened by
ominous warnings of the looming race war. Nowadays the fiery
rhetoric is directed at the "pimply-faced" Kirchick, "Benito"
Giuliani, and the "so-called
'libertarians'" at reason and Cato.
But perhaps the best refutation of the old approach is not the
absence of race-baiting rhetoric from its progenitors, but the
success of the 2008 Ron Paul phenomenon. The man who was once the
Great Paleolibertarian Hope has built a broad base of enthusiastic
supporters without resorting to venomous rhetoric or coded racism.
He has stuck stubbornly to the issues of sound money, "humble
foreign policy," and shrinking the state. He wraps up his
speeches with a three-part paean to individualism: "I don't
want to run your life," "I don't want to run the economy," and "I
don't want to run the world." He talks about the disproportionate
effect of the drug war on African-Americans, and appeared at a
September 2007
Republican debate on black issues that was boycotted by the
then-frontrunners. All this and more have brought him $30
million-plus from more than 100,000 donors; thousands of campaign
volunteers; and the largest rallies he's ever spoken to, including
a crowd of almost 5,000 in Philadelphia.
Yet those new supporters, many of whom are first encountering
libertarian ideas through the Ron Paul Revolution, deserve a far
more frank explanation than the campaign has as yet provided of how
their candidate's name ended up atop so many ugly words. Ron Paul
may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of
pandering to racists—and taking "moral responsibility" for that now
means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling
with his own past—acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise
he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the
philosophy to which he has committed his life.
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